I have changed course and speed seemingly because now we are so beyond tresholds that feature patches can't get in. So we are in bugfix mode and I have chosen performance ones because those will help in a lot of ways: it will kill a lot of majors and criticals and also speed up testing which helps development overall. Also, the EntityQuery relationship patch relies on converting everything to the new Entity API and that can't happen if it's slow. For now, I am working on CMI performance is one problematic issue which I took on but it turns out it will need actually first an architecture change and then we can add caching. It's almost ready which means it now only needs a week of work ;)

Config metadata work have shifted because the previous patch I tried to salvage was too complex according to... everyone. I am working on another, simple one, we will see how this turns out.

Bugfixing is great because occasionally it shines light on not just a local braino but a deep set architecture problem. We were debugging a mysterious failure and it turned out, if somehow the ip_limit value from the user.flood config object gets lost you won't be able to log in. Opsie! This means the config metadata I am already involved with needs to get a required flag. Good to know :)

I would like to share a dream with my readers -- and hope some readers come up with sponsorship for this dream. The thresholds I mentioned keep the number of bugs at a sane level. That would mean we do not need a long time to fix them and to shorten that period more, the best is to do sprints. Surely there will be a sprint at Portland DrupalCon, which is at the end of May. Even before the new feature squeeze and associated deadlines were announced there was talk of Drupal DevDays in Dublin at the very end of June and sprinting the week before. Last year there was a Midwest Developer Summit -- if it repeats we can have a sprint early August. Finally, there's DrupalCon Prague which is end of September. One sprint every six weeks to sprint to release. The dream is that we can find enough money to sponsor ~20-25 people, the biggest contributors so far to participate in all four and thus get to a release on October 15, just two weeks after Prague. Then we can go to BADcamp and discuss Drupal 9 :)